Death certificate is easier than paperwork for missing person: Mushk opens up on father’s kidnapping

Model Mushk Kaleem has previously opened up about her struggles with a conservative family and body dysmorphia. However, for the first time, she opened up about another traumatic experience – her father’s tragic disappearance and how it affected her family. She also spoke about the rishta culture and how she met the love of her life, her husband, Nadir Zia.

Kaleem made a guest appearance on Frieha Altaf’s FWhy podcast and shared that her father worked abroad while she lived with her mother, uncles and brothers in Karachi while discussing her upbringing. Upon asking about the reason behind her father’s absence, Kaleem revealed he has been a “missing person” for 10 years after he was kidnapped by Somalian pirates while working for an American cargo shipping company in Nigeria.

“He was kidnapped on February 22, 2013, so this year actually completes 10 years of him being missing. He was taken hostage, they took him off his ship and transferred him to a pirate ship,” she said. “They were Somalian pirates. Back in 2013, I remember I was in my second semester of university and we found out that his ship had been hijacked and the ship he was in broke down in the middle of the sea. We knew this because another Pakistani man on the ship managed to come back. He was with him in the sea and then a storm parted them,” she exclaimed.

The model said that a day earlier, her mother told her that her father’s death certificate had been made “because, in Pakistan, you can’t get the paperwork done for a missing person that easily.”

Upon her ancestral background, Kaleem shared that she’s Urdu speaking and her maternal family migrated from India. “We’re from Deoband, and I only know this because this kind of stuff comes up a lot during the rishta process. My brother and I got married around the same time, so we know how people like to go back on your family’s history,” she said.

Talking about marriage, Kaleem had been married for a year and a half to her beau. Talking about her relationship, she said, “If you asked me five years ago, I would have never even thought about marrying someone older than me and from a very different background. But it’s going great.”

Upon how they met, Kaleem recalled the time when one of her clients invited her to a rave at their house and that’s where she met him through friends. “We were both moving out of certain relationships. They say, ‘misery needs company’ so initially, we felt like we were rebounding off of each other but then we gave it a fair shot,” she said. “When you’re in your late 20s, everyone wants to settle down. I wasn’t looking for a hookup or something casual and then COVID hit. We were together and then one thing led to the other, and we’re married now.”

The host then further asked her about society’s backlash at her wedding and how models like her and Sadaf Kanwal had to justify and face trolls when they married people who were at the end of their relationships. “Divorces, especially the paperwork, take more than a year in Pakistan. A lot of people say that she should’ve waited till the paperwork got done. So, when I was initially introducing him to my friends or family, the gossip got to me, and I would question whether his relationship was completely over. It wasn’t okay with my mom either that I was marrying someone who was already married once, but needless to say, that Nadir and my mom are very good now.”

About giving a response to trolls, Kaleem said that she doesn’t do many interviews and hence, never got a chance to explain her marriage to people and she’s glad that she got an opportunity to clarify it now.

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